We are all collaborators now: the cowardice of the Godless

Cowardice may be the defining sin of our times - such an extremity of cowardice that people are afraid even to think virtuously.

Modern Man has no courage, because he has no reason for courage: nothing to be courageous about.

Acts of the most disgusting cowardice are observed and reported daily, without comment or even with approval - almost any excuse of expedience, of fear of risk - or the mere possibility of risk, is regarded as sufficient to justify cowardice of men or women.

And if there is real courage, it is undercut and dismissed by cynicism - the same cynicism that justifies cowardice, erodes courage.


Modern Man takes cowardice to new levels.

In the past people knew what they ought to do, and realised that cowardice was when they did not do what they knew they ought to do. Thus Men convicted themselves of cowardice.

And as CS Lewis remarked in The Screwtape Letters; to know one's own cowardice - to know that one failed to do what one ought to have done because of cowardice - is a really horrible feeling. It is one of the worst forms of guilt. 

And Modern man is so systematically and frequently cowardly, that this self-conviction would be intolerable - If he allowed himself to have genuine moral principles...

However, by pre-surrendering to evil, by denying the reality of God and thereby emptying his soul of natural Goodness - Modern Man acquits himself of cowardice. We are indeed Hollow Men, Men-without-chests...


Without God - without any God - in a universe (supposedly) created from random change and blind causality - there is no compelling reason to be virtuous; and cowardice can be redefined as Nothing-But a psychological control mechanism, a manipulation by religious authorities (as indeed some of cowardice sometimes was).

Insofar as Modern man has any conviction it is that he has a duty to be happy, attain pleasure (especially sexual), avoid suffering - and therefore, avoid trouble, and keep on the right-side of those with power.


In the past, there were those who resisted alien occupying nations at great person risk and despite great personal suffering. The Resistance.

And there were those who collaborated - who made the best of the actually-existing situation, and made most of the opportunities they presented - the cowards who systematically did-the-wrong-thing, and benefited immediately and personally in terms of pleasure and avoiding suffering.

However; the collaborators mostly knew exactly what they were; their actions indicate that they were convicted by their own conscience; but other motivations (e.g. fear, greed, lust, conceit) were more powerful than shame or duty to conscience.


Now The West has been permanently occupied by aliens - by a strategically-evil Establishment, by a ruling and governing class who actively and openly lie-to, exploit and oppress the People.

But there is no resistance: resistance has evaporated.

Why? Because for Godless cowards there is never any sufficiently-compelling reason to resist.

We are all collaborators now, pretty much. Yet most Modern people lack sufficient integrity of conscience to acknowledge this simple reality to themselves, even in private thought.

So, in reality, we are something worse than collaborators.

Why don't modern people realize their cowardice? Simply because they feel nothing is worth sacrificing for

I often (as in the previous post) reference the historically unprecedented cowardice of people in the world today; as I often reference their unprecedented dishonesty. 

Both phenomena have the same root, which is the pervasive and official atheism and materialism - hence denial of any purpose or meaning for human life.

Quite aside from explicit and propagandized beliefs; modern society operates on the basis that this universe is an accidental outcome of 'physics' and Man is an accidental outcome of "chemistry plus, later, biological evolution" operating in that physics-context. 

Each individual Man is assumes to arise at conception or birth, and to be extinguished by death. 

In sum - the officially-endorsed and universally-disseminated message is that each Man emerges into a meaningless world; a world which came-from and is-going nowhere in particular (and nothing to do with us, personally), and soon is snuffed-out. 

Any 'meaning' we choose to make or accept is likewise contingent and brief; and anything of our-selves that may exist beyond our death (e.g. in the memories of others or the records of civilization) will also come to an absolute end. 

Just as our own lives are a biological-chemical blip - then gone forever; with nothing remaining; so are the lives of all other Men; so are our families, places, nations and the civilization.

(All of which  -we are increasingly told by official sources - will very soon [e.g. by 2030] be gone, forever, with nothing remaining.)  

 

In sum:

Modern man has nothing to live for (beyond any current gratifications he may personally feel) - and absolutely no hope of anything better ever under any circumstances; and he is convinced that to believe otherwise is delusion. 

In such circumstances, each Man knows nothing for certain more than his current state of well-being or adversity - and nothing is worth sacrificing his current well-being for; because nothing in the longer term is certain, and anyway it will not last.  

But courage entails the sacrifice of current well-being for some goal considered to be more important - so naturally Modern Men are cowards, since they are convinced of nothing more important. 

Modern Men are above all expedient; seeking the easiest way through life with a short time-horizon - and when that involves cowardice, lying, incoherence, and obedience to evil - well, so it goes. 

Given what they believe they 'know' - it would be foolish  to do otherwise. 

And so Men's own cowardice is invisible!

Because (for them) nothing is worth sacrificing for - courage is seen as delusion. And cowardice is re-labelled as common sense - or indeed a higher wisdom.  

Therefore, the most cowardly population in world history believes itself to be the boldest! Brave, bold and unashamed in their lying, groveling, manipulated expediency!

Why won't people acknowledge the nihilistic dead-end we live in?

If you try to speak to anybody about the kind of things I discuss on this blog - you won't get far: indeed you won't get anywhere.

And the difficulty is that there is not just one reason for this, but many reasons - mutually reinforcing, like a Roman shield-wall: when one reason is eliminated, another reason steps forward to take its place; and there are many such reinforcements.

It is clear enough that we in The West are on a track to disaster - indeed multiple, linked disasters of damnation, population replacement, civilisational collapse - with mass civil and international wars, epidemics and starvation.

Indeed, it is likely that much of this is unavoidable. Yet by-and-large, people don't care; or prefer not to think about it. After all, we are all bad at prediction, and maybe it won't happen - or won't happen until we are dead and gone (such a hope is one I hear commonly expressed among the elderly).

Probably the core fact is that people don't want to think about things. And this objective of never thinking is easier for them then ever before - with the ubiquity of mass and social media. Observing the behaviour of people as they go about their business, it is clear that not thinking is a major motivation.

And the attitude is - why bother? Why bother thinking when the end point is despair? This despair is multi-faceted - the deepest and most existential level is the despair of death being annihilation; the belief that after we die nothing remains of us.

(Is anybody really convinced by the non-sequitur that we continue to live in other people's memories?  This is not so much false as irrelevant.)

So the mass of people find their life to be rising from nothing and disappearing into nothing. And the same annihilation is the fate of everything in this world which they care about... their family, friends, their village or nation, the arts and sciences, and their churches... all are destined for annihilation of one kind or another.

All possible hopes are therefore focused on our mortal lives - and as culture and everything crumbles around us (or rather, is gleefully demolished and the process labelled progress); our mortal lives have narrowed to a focus on getting pleasure and avoiding suffering.

And since anything we personally might do to improve things in the long term will always increase our personal suffering in the short term - without any guarantee of making any positive difference after all... Why bother?

This sense of Why Bother, What's the Point?  is the root of one of the most prevalent and denied of modern sins - cowardice: both physical, and moral.

The only way to combat our natural cowardice is by faith in a larger perspective; the kind of faith that leads people to do the right thing (as they understand it) regardless of the probabilities of outcomes. Because they see the small, seemingly ephemeral events and decisions of life as being part of larger and permanent things.

There is an extremely high prevalence of lying in public life. In all major institutions - lies are the meat and drink of communication. There are some true sentences spoken and written - because effective lies need to contain facts - but every paragraph is dishonest, tendentious, deliberately misleading. A modern executive, manager, official, leader, spokesman... cannot speak for five minutes without lying.

The lying is thus another facet of cowardice: modern people are lying cowards, cowardly liars. And why not? - when dishonesty and compliance lead to more pleasure and less pain, as they generally do in a corrupt society?  

There is a stark choice, and we are all faced with it; of living within society and outwith it. But modern society has occupied almost the entirety of the material world; so where could we go?

The answer is simple - that living outwith society means living in the larger world of God. To escape materialism and that which controls the material; we can only turn to the spirit. When the mundane has nothing to offer - we must inhabit the transcendent. When our every word and action is constrained and coerced - we need to dwell in our thinking.

And we need to know, with inner surety and confidence, that God, the spirit, the transcendent are all real and of prime importance - and that thinking makes a difference.

That knowledge is the most precious gift we could have - and attaining it should be the objective of everybody; it is the single most important thing in Life.

Motivation in the modern world

*

Perhaps the deepest problem in the modern world is lack of motivation.

It is lack of motivation which can be argued to lie behind the more obvious short-termist hedonism and expedient cowardice which dominates modern public life.

It is the lack of motivation which leads all of the developed world to choose sub-replacement fertility; we lack even the motivation necessary to reproduce ourselves.

*

What is needed is a motivation which is less short-termist and pleasure orientated - which is prepared to suffer and strive for Goodness.

But motivation is a means, not an end; one cannot be 'motivated' in a vacuum or without an object - and modern culture is a vacuum.

One can only be motivated towards some-thing or -things - and the object of motivation must seem worthwhile in order to overcome the distractions, short-termist pleasures, and expedient pressures of modern life.

*

The average answer to this need for motivation - for most people most of the time - is religion (including, but not necessarily, Christianity); and it is the absence of religion that is demotivating the developed world.

It is the lack of religion which renders us demotivated into sub-fertility; and devout, traditional religion is the only known antidote to sub-fertility in modern societies.

*

So how does motivation work to overcome the short-termist, hedonistic, expedient?

Well, the wrong answer is that it allows people to 'defer satisfactions'.

Not True. False.

In reality the only thing which enables us to overcome a passion is a stronger passion; the only way to overcome a pleasurable temptation is the even-greater happiness to be gained by living in accordance with longer term goals of extreme happiness.

Thus religious passion trumps worldly passions, and the here-and-now deeply-joyous hope of eternal happiness beats-back the relatively feeble temptations of pleasurable distractions.

*

So, potentially, long termism is ultimately not a state of worldly self-denial, sacrificing here-and-now happiness in pursuit of remote-happiness in a hoped-for life to come; rather long-termism is a consequence of the greater here-and-now and currently-experienced happiness, consequent upon living a strategic worldly life in anticipation of the joyous life to come.

It is a greater short-term pleasure of living a religiously motivated life which renders controllable the lesser short-termist pleasures of a life devoted merely to avoiding suffering and passing the time as pleasantly as possible.

It is the current satisfaction of working strategically towards a truly satisfying goal that leads to happiness; while chasing after instant pleasure, detached from any valued objective, is a recipe for jadedness, aggressive pursuit of ever feebler satisfactions, and self-disgust.

*

Why are modern men so lacking in courage?

Why are modern men so lacking in courage? 

The answer is; because they lack that which sustains courage - which is 'religion', which is some-thing deeply assumed/ lived-by that is transcendent to this mortal life.

Without this; the bottom-line is expediency; which is the opposite of courage.


Yet in addition, the nature of courage has changed - which is why even the few Christian and religious Westerners are lacking it.

In an inversion (one that complements and compensates-for the moral inversions of modernity) what used-to-be courage has now become expediency


In the past, courage was a social virtue. It was a type of conformity to the group. Its special characteristics were obedience and loyalty. Thus the courageous individual was not required to strike-out alone nor be independent; but rather to assimilate to the group ethic: the group defined the ethical.

Courage was standard recommended behaviour - and the problem was subordinating the individual preference to conform to the group preference. Courage was doing what the group recommended.

(Military courage is of this type; and so is the courage required of a saintly monk.)

In other words; in the past, virtue was defined by the group, and transgressed by the individual.


Now things are different and almost the opposite. Virtue is individual (or not at all) because society is corrupt.

To be obedient and loyal to any modern group (institution, corporation, church etc.) is expedient, and to lack courage: to be on-the-side-of evil.

Courage must therefore be individual, goes unrewarded (or is often punished) by society and social institutions; and the needful courage is cold rather than hot.

(Hot courage is short-term, unthinking and in the heat of the moment. But cold courage is considered, long-termist and must strive-against against the continual pressure of unrelenting opposed expediency.)


Modern courage is 'a big ask' of anyone; and only those with a supremely strong and inner reason for courage are capable of it. Extremely few modern people have any such inner reason; hence cowardice is not only the norm (which is not unusual) but is actually praised and regarded as virtuous by society.

Only a solid and powerful adherence to some-thing transcendent (something located outwith this mortal life and temporary earth) is able to sustain such individual cold courage.

So, courage is nowadays not something that can be recommended by worldly criteria; but only by and for those who fundamental perspective is 'not of this world'; for those who genuinely look for validation and reward primarily beyond this mortal life.

Note added: The fact that Modern Men are indeed lacking in courage ought to be obvious to the meanest intellect; however I became personally aware of this fact through many and sustained personal experiences in four main areas of contemporary life: Medicine, the National Health Service bureaucracy, Science (specifically medical science and biology), and Academia and Education more generally (since I was also engaged in English Literature and Philosophy; as well as having a professional interest in the history of education, education policy and scientometrics - i.e. the quantitative measurement of academic outputs). 

The psychology of abstract suicide deriving from secular altruism - the 'hypocrisy' of Western elites is a necessary consequence of self-destructive policies pursued by cowardly and short-termist people

*
While The West as a culture is clearly suicidal - and suicidal in a long-term, planned and strategic manner - it is interesting to analyse how this arises as an indirect consequence of altruism being the greatest Good, the highest-valued virtue in a secular Leftist society.

While pretty-much all of the other (one-sided and partial) virtues of The Left have by now been discarded, altruism - favouring others above oneself - remains as the ultimate.

And, in a secular context, where reality lacks any objective basis, altruism becomes necessarily subjective and relativistic - which means that altruism has become, in practice, defined in terms of the effect on 'me'.

*

Since in secular modernity there is no objective concept of doing Good - Good has been reduced to pleasure, and pleasure cannot be measured or quantified in other people - so 'doing Good to others' has been redefined as 'doing harm to myself'.

In a modern, 'relativist' context, without God; instead of doing-good to others; secular Left altruism is redefined as doing-harm to myself.

*

Modern political altruism is therefore a mass, cumulative consequence of the ethic of 'doing harm to myself' but refracted through human short-termism and cowardice.

That is, a modern secular Leftist sets-out to harm himself - but is thwarted by his own cowardly short-termism, and he ends-up doing harm to other people similar to himself.

He tries to help 'the other' by hurting himself, ultimately by killing himself - but lacks the moral resources to implement his plan on himself - and therefore (guiltily, but effectively) expends great effort and ingenuity personally to avoid the consequences of his own advocated policies.

*

Because secular modernity has rejected religion, specifically Christianity, then it has no basis for educating, supporting or enforcing the full range of Christian virtues including courage and prudence - and modern culture is notably cowardly and impulsive (short-termist).

So the most moral modern secular people want to be good by being altruistic, and can only understand altruism to be what harms themselves - but they lack the courage, self-discipline and long-termism actually to implement this morality upon themselves personally.

Therefore, modern secular Leftist morality advocates an abstract form of self-harm - in which the advocate can (in a cowardly and short-termist fashion) work towards self-harm and suicide (which he regards as 'altruism') yet in practice to do his utmost to avoid these bad consequences falling upon himself, now.

*

The typical moralistic Leftist therefore advocates policies which harm other people like himself now - and finds excuses (or just feels guilty - 'liberal guilt') for the fact that his own position remains insulated from these bad consequences, in the short term.

The typical moralistic Leftist therefore has policies against his own interests - his sex, class, race, social situation - but in practice exempts himself as much as possible from these bad consequences, because he is a short-termist coward who lacks the real Christian basis to be anything else.

So we see strategic, abstract 'class warriors' who in practice accept knighthoods and peerages; strategic abstract egalitarians who are the ultra-rich; those who in principle argue in favour of high taxes, yet avoid paying them; white family men who occupy high status jobs but who argue that blacks, women and those of unconventional sexuality should ideally occupy such jobs; those who favour population replacement by mass immigration in the West elaborately cocooning themselves from the social destruction and suffering this brings; those who strategically and abstractly crusade against 'private' schools and health care (i.e. against the possibility of going outside state-controlled provision) yet avail themselves of its advantages; those who advocate a 'small carbon footprint' yet who travel everywhere by private jets and dwell in vast and wasteful mansions - and so on and on and on through all the other gross hypocrisies of the Left.

*

It is indeed absolutely normal and inevitable for the powerful Left elites to invent ever-more new pseudo-moral policies which are imposed by ever-more laws, taxes, subsidies, regulations and mass media propaganda at an international, national, local and institutional level - yet themselves, personally to evade the ethics they themselves have invented as much as they possibly can.

What seems like hypocrisy is simply moral weakness operating in a context of a self-destroying ethic; secular Leftist altruists believe-in suicide - that is, they believe in the self-destruction of people-like-themselves, but - precisely because they are secular, hence relativists/nihilists - they have no basis for all-round virtue, so they do their utmost to squirm-out-of the consequences of their own policies.

They have enough moral strength for only one virtue, thus any Good which may come from the pursuit of that single virtue is undone and more, by the failure to pursue other virtues and by the unrecognised, denied and unrestrained evils out-with the one-eyed pursuit of altruism.

*

'The personal is political' means, in practice, that politics is for 'other people', for the general good, for abstract altruism; but not for me.

For such reasons, pursuit of any single virtue always leads to great sin: monomania is always net-destructive of Good.

In secular modernity, the monomania is for altruism - altruism redefined in the only way that secular modernity can recognize. 

*

Courage without hope? Once possible, possible no more

One of the ideas of JRR Tolkien that seems to have influence far beyond the scope of his works, is that of the Northern idea of courage without hope. "Northern", especially in terms of the Norse culture of Scandinavia (including Iceland), and also the broader Germanic culture, including Anglo-Saxon England.  

It seems that the Northern style of paganism was one without ultimate hope, because only the greatest heroes could look forward to a continuation of martial life beyond death; but (in the Scandinavian religion) even these, and the gods themselves, were destined to be defeated and annihilated in the final battle of Ragnarok.

The quality that Tolkien, and others, admire about Northern courage, is that such Men would continue to strive and to fight, despite that they accepted the certainty of defeat. 

This kind of bleak, stoic, attitude of courage without hope, is one that is often advocated as suitable for modern Men; since our culture is also one without ultimate hope. 

Indeed moderns are without even the proximate possibility of a temporary persistence of life beyond death; as warriors training for that final, doomed-to-fail, battle.

Something similar might be asserted for the Hebrews of the Old Testament, who seem to have believed themselves all to be destined to a (literally) nightmarish post-mortal existence as demented ghosts in Sheol; yet who were apparently capable of extreme fortitude and striving.  

But I regard the conceptualization of courage without hope to be a modern, anachronistic, and fundamentally untrue characterization of the attitude of ancient Men. I regard the conceptualization as flawed by failing to take into account that ancient Men were much more groupish in their consciousness, much less individual. 

Ancient Men were not alienated, did not experience themselves as cut-off from other people, the natural world, and the world of spirits and gods. 

On the contrary, they seem to have experienced life as spontaneously immersed in the consciousness of these other Beings. Their awareness, and their actual perceptions, included other Men, animals, plants, spirits and gods - and the dead were, at times, directly experienced as being present and active.  

My understanding is that this spontaneously immersive and diffusely-aware consciousness, this connectedness to other including spirits and the dead, meant that ancient Men could not be without hope in the way that modern Men routinely are. 

We Moderns are spontaneously alienated from "the world" from our adolescence; and we are kept in this state of genuine hope-less-ness through adult life by both implicit and explicit metaphysical assumptions of our culture. 

We Moderns are not just alone in a dead universe, we mostly believe that our consciousness is a mere by-product of brain functioning; we are taught that the only communication is via signals, symbols, words and images; all of which are distorted, manipulative, and prone to misinterpretation -- so we can rely on nothing to be true. 

We are even taught that our inner subjectivity, our stream of thinking, is cut-off from our own minds and bodies; as well as isolated from every-body and every-thing else -- so our self-awareness and -experience is trapped and helpless, a mere prisoner inside the brain-box.  

Our culture both asserts, and has these assumptions built-into public discourse - mass media, official communications, laws, rules and regulations; that the universe happened without overall purpose or meaning, that the material is the only reality, that there are no gods or spirits; and that human life is a merely contingent product of prior material causes. 

We are said to be no more than a "random" combination of genes, developing in an accidental environment, and bounded by a death which entails complete destruction of body and mind. 

Thus modern Man is hope-less, disconnected, and alone in an utterly futile universe that lacks purpose and where values are merely temporary expedients; conventions made-up to motivate people duing their brief existences and to make society possible. 

Therefore, ancient Men were never hope-less in the way that is normal for modern Man. Their courage was, indeed, rooted in a spontaneous, unconscious and inevitable sense of connectedness to a purposive and meaningful reality - innate assumptions that were far more powerful than even the most nihilistic religious conceptualizations. 

In modern Men, as we see all around us; hopelessness leads inexorably to cowardice; because there is no reason at all for Men to be courageous in the nihilistic world of Western Culture.   

Hope in the context of modernity

*

In the pre-modern era there were civilizations that lived upon the mere hope of hope - the varieties of paganism, the Ancient Hebrews of the Old Testament and many others.

They did not have grounds for hope, nor anything specific to hope for; but they hoped that such grounds and actualities might nonetheless exist.

This was possible, was natural, in a world where everyone believed that the soul or spirit survived death.

*

The noble pagans (of which many are recorded) always implicitly operated on the basis that there were permanent standards of human behaviour, and that humans were meant to live by them; and that if humans did not live by these permanent standards then there were genuinely-bad consequences which extended beyond their personal death.

Although unarticulated, this perspective necessarily means that the universe somehow has a very long-lasting and personal interest in the doings of each person.


*

But modernity disbelieves in post-mortal existence, and therefore insists that hope be this-worldly.

For modernity, hope must be located in this world, because there is nowhere else for it to be located.

However, it turns-out that there are no this-worldly grounds for hope - so disbelieving in the next world, there are no grounds for hope.

It turns-out that modernity systematically eliminates all grounds for hope; and insists that this is merely realistic, and that all previous human generations were grossly deluded.  

*

We live in the most hope-less world ever.

Somehow, modernity has persuaded almost everybody that 'science has discovered' that death is extinction (sorry, somehow I missed that research paper so I can't give a reference). 

What has really happened is that the metaphysical understanding of reality has changed - modernity operates on a different set of assumptions than any society in human history: that there is no human spirit or soul, that death is extinction, that the purpose of mortal life must be contained within mortal life, that there is no god/ God of any kind - and so on.

These modernist metaphysical assumptions were not discovered - they were invented; they have not been proven - they have simply become habitual to the point that people cannot imagine anything otherwise.

*

Under modern conditions, therefore, paganism is hope-less - and many types of society which used to work on the basis merely of hoping-for-hope, will not work any longer: hoping for hope will not cut the mustard under the pervasive nihilism of modernity.

Thus, under modernity, the human race has gone mad with despair - and instead of hope there are only negative energizing motivations: pleasure seeking distraction and hate-fuelled destruction.

Under such conditions, the only ones with hope that is strong enough to combat the all invading and aggressive despair, are those whose hope is correctly-located in the life-to-come, and whose belief in that hopeful life-to-come is strong and secure.

*

The challenge for any religion in the modern world is that it must provide hope in a hopeless world - in a world whose habitual and publicly-enforced thinking eliminates any possible grounds for hope.

(And - even worse - a world which stupidly, carelessly and lying-ly denies that this is what it is doing.)

This is very, very difficult; and many, many religions that used-to 'work', do not work any longer; they were destroyed, they have gone - leaving only shells.

They simply could not withstand the unprecedented hope-destroying power of modernity.

*

Modernity is a hurricane of skeptical assumptions.

Lots of religions, ideologies, world views which were functional in the past, have withered under the blast of modernity because they were undercut by modernist metaphysical assumptions.

Religion now must be far stronger than ever it was before - and the metaphysical basis of religion, the structuring frame of interpretation which shapes all experience and reasoning - must, nowadays, stand apart from the mainstream of public discourse (and will therefore seem stupid or crazy by prevailing standards) - and yet this religious frame must be believed in a way strong enough to withstand continuous and unrelenting attack from modern institutions and from the mass media. 

*

We have now 'done the experiment' with this-worldly hope and the results are in - our public culture has, for several generations, insisted that hope be located in this world and within mortality; and that hope located beyond death is dumb, evil, crazy nonsense.

We have done the experiment, and we can see the results: nihilism, paralysis, lies, deliberate ugliness, strategic vice, decadent addiction to comfort, clamouring egotism, cowardice, craving of stimulation... in one word - ignobility.

*

The modern pagan stands in the starkest possible contrast to the bleak, stoic dignity of an ancient pagan!

There is no modern Socrates.

No wonder that there are so few religions that 'make a difference' under modernity! - existence is harder for real religion than ever before, anywhere.

*

The lessons:

We must have hope.

Hope must be located beyond mortal life. 

*

And all this is a matter of habitual metaphysical assumptions - a matter of how we, personally, at the deepest level, interpret life.

And this we can choose - and indeed must and do choose; because nobody and nothing can prevent us from choosing.

And, having chosen, we will experience the consequences of our choice. 

*

Epidemic phobic avoidance

Continuing my psychiatric diagnosis of our situation; I observe a very obvious phenomenon of phobic avoidance in relation to the birdemic.

Indeed, this is a plain and obvious fact, and one that is well understood: If we respond to an irrational phobia by avoiding it, then that phobia will be strengthened by apparent confirmation of the strategy of avoidance, and the consequent lack of a possibility of being refuted by experience.


So, people are more afraid of the birdemic Now (when it is over, and deaths back to baseline) than they were when it was actually killing people (albeit at a rate some fifty-fold less than 'expected'/ 'officially-predicted').

But this should not be surprising. When there was no unusual threat to begin with (at the level of a bad influenza), and yet massive-wholesale avoidance was deployed; the innate tendency is to assume that it was the behavioural avoidance that 'saved' people from the imagined threat.


This is seen in simple-specific phobias. If a British person suffers arachnophobia (and there are no dangerous spiders in Britain), and responds by escalating avoidance of first spiders, then the places spiders characteristically inhabit, finally places where spiders might be... then a specific and circumscribed phobia develops into a generalised anxiety state; where fear is constant and the sufferer's life and behaviour are increasingly limited: dominated by futile spider-avoidance practices.

This is precisely the situation for the birdemic; where all casual social interactions among strangers are Now dominated by birdemic-awareness and orientated-around avoidance of a non-existent (i.e. normal, baseline) birdemic threat - and this behaviour is being first sustained and then amplified by the apparent success at avoiding the threat.


It would be foolish to suppose that this is an unintended consequence of policy - in other words, this is precisely what They have engineered by their colossal programme of evil-lying propaganda and totalitarian control.

Okay, but phobias are treatable - by 'behavioural therapy', which can easily be self-administered - and is indeed just common sense...

Behavioural therapy is so simple as to be summarisable in a sentence: To overcome a fear we must expose ourselves to that fear - we will then get-used-to that fear - and by repetition, learn to stop reacting to it.

The barrier to successful treatment is typically that the sufferer does not want to get better, is unwilling to suffer short-term discomfort for a long-term cure; therefore refuses to expose himself to that which is feared.

That is the current situation. The mass public do not want to get better.


Why? In a negative sense - cowardice. Modern Men lack courage because they lack the motivation of religion and will do nothing about that because - in a positive sense - Modern Men are wedded to evil, have embraced evil: are on the side of those who oppose God, Good and divine creation.

In another sense: conformity. In this totalitarian world, the fear is to be singled-out as Not conforming, to be detected as Not 100% onboard with the ideology.

In a world of mandatory and uniform phobic avoidance; to be brave, independent in thinking; to be loving, spiritual and Christian - is to be marked as an enemy of the World State.


So the massive, apparently world-wide, phobic avoidance is merely a rational symptom of mass corruption.

People could recover from it in a few days - but only if they actually wanted to recover.

The fact that people do not want to recover is a measure of the mass prevalence and dominance of evil. And that is something which cannot be reversed in a few days.

The desire to live in bliss and without suffering is - ultimately - a desire for annihilation

To live always in bliss is a common enough ideal; yet it entails the removal of past and future (adverse past memories, feared possible futures) such that only the present is experienced and real. 

We may have experienced such bliss, briefly; as when it is said that eternity can be found in the moment - and some want it permanently. 

Yet to want permanent bliss is to want not-to-be; because the present moment does not exist: as a time-slice - with nothing before or after - it is infinitely small. 

To have (to experience, to know-of) neither past nor future is not-to-be.  

To want to escape suffering - wholly and forever - entails losing all awareness of every-thing. 

This would be to exist in the present moment without desire and without attachment - which means without sense of self. 

To escape suffering therefore requires not-to-be a distinct-being (or, at least, not to be aware of oneself as a being). One must become subjectively unaware that one exists. 

Not to suffer at-all or ever, is a state indistinguishable from complete and permanent annihilation. 

If this sounds like a reductio ad absurdum, reflect that it is very common - almost normal - to feel thus. 

It is perhaps only a kind of uncertainty about what will happen afterwards (a residual fear that death might not be annihilation), plus cowardice about the physical painfulness (suffering) of actually-doing-it; that stops many modern people from killing themselves...

Which is why so many of them clamour for the 'right' painlessly to be murdered (i.e. 'euthanasia') on demand. 

A rejoinder might be that what most people really want is neither complete nor permanent; but simply greater and more sustained happiness, and an end to severe suffering. This even sounds-like common sense...

But these are not an answer that has satisfied; and we know this because so many people already live that answer, and have done for many decades in the West. 

Many or most modern people already have experienced historically-unprecedented gratification of happiness and elimination of physical suffering; yet they are not satisfied by such quantitative improvements.

Indeed, more than in many times and places of the past (insofar as such things can be compared) modern people have been distinctive for their escalating fear, resentment and despair. They have in fact - whatever the theory - focused on the incompleteness of their bliss; and the unbearability of their residual suffering. 

Hence the apparently widespread (albeit often implicit - since modern Man usually refuses to think consciously and consecutively about fundamental matters) desire for total happiness and the absence of suffering; as the only proper, un-controversially Good goals of life. 

All of which goes to show that ideals which are normal and widespread, common-sensical and regarded as ethically-vital; can nonetheless be incoherent nonsense. 

 

Is it true that Man is a primarily religious being?

The literal insanity of mainstream public discourse, and the lack of insight of this fact, suggests that Man without religion is non-viable.

To put matters another way - religion is the most important thing in the human world. 

Of course, a few individuals, in the short term, can survive atheism mentally intact; but there is no evidence at all that this is a possibility for human societies over more than a few decades - then the signs of insanity (incoherence, exitinction) become more-and-more obvious... or they would do so if loss of insight was not itself a prime sign of insanity.

So insanity shields us from knowledge of our own insanity, because insanity destroys insight as much as it destroys judgement - it affects the whole mode of thinking.

How, then, do we know we, as a society, are insane?

1. By applying older judgements, from the time before Men became insane - reading old books, talking to non-modern people...

2. By looking at the basic biological viability of atheist societies in terms of reproduction, demographics, response to direct and immediate threats, scale of priorities ... Compare societies and groups that are biologically viable, with the modern atheist societies that are not...

3. By reflecting on how we feel about Life. Insane people are almost always miserable - dysphoric, despairing, desperate... almost all of the time. Even the euphoric frenzy of mania is brittle, and crashes into suicidal self-destruction with a high frequency. Is there hope?

In conclusion - religion is the most important thing.

Religion is necessary for long term motivation, for social coherence, for purpose, and to enable the individual to be a part of the whole.

Since religion is necessary, if or when humans either dispense with religion or else place it anything lower than first in priority; then they as individuals and their societies will begin to fall apart and spiral towards alienation, purposelessness, inability to perceive or reason what is important, cowardice (i.e. short-term selfishness), desperation and all the rest of it.

Modernity is the experiment of Man living without Religion. The experiment has been running for several generations.

But the experiment of modernity has deprived modern people of the motivation, honesty and ability to evaluate the results of the experiment - by the always changing criteria of modernity, modernity sees no alternative to itself...

Conclusion: Religion is objectively necessary; and, by one kind of reasoning, therefore true. If you are not religious you are living in error. If you are not religious then you need to become religious. The question you must settle is not whether you should be religious, but which religion you will adopt.

Hard and soft hearts - and toughness

*

We must make tough decisions - that is decisions that are right but which lead to upfront, immediate costs.

For those with a soft, warm heart - these decisions are a cause of pain; but we must not harden our hearts to make tough decisions.

*

It is, indeed, a terrible spiritual hazard to harden the heart - for any reason or purpose whatsoever. Nothing, ever justifies deliberate hardening of the heart.

*

Because to harden the heart is to exclude love, to build a carapace of pride - it is, indeed, an act of cowardice: hard-hearted people are cowards, in the sense that they take the easier and more expedient root of not caring.

I perceive many people, many intellectuals in particular, and perhaps especially intellectuals on the secular Right (Nietzsche as the model), adopting a strategy of deliberate heart-hardening.

They expose themselves to evils and suffering with the aim of becoming immune to them, of deadening their reactions to them. They want to be tough, imperturbable, at the cost of hardening their hearts, indeed by means of hardening theie hearts.

*

(The ideal of being 'cool' is this - it is a fairly pure form of evil since it entails chilling the soul until it is unaffected by good of bad, but moves serenely through life, needing nobody else, living-off its own invincible self-regard.)

*

Fr Seraphim Rose perceived hardening of the heart as one of the great hazards of the modern world especially among Christians. He saw this as a hazard of ultra-correctness in religious practice - of legalism, rule-following, an enforcement of the self-righteous spirit.

Once hardness has become advanced in us, we find it difficult or almost impossible to come into contact with the world, of feeling life, when we cannot moved by anything for good or ill (only experiencing pleasure or pain - but not feeling joy or sorrow).

Orthodox holiness is a matter of tears.

Real tears are a consequence of a soft heart experiencing joy and sorrow - not hysterical tears, obviously not faked and manipulative tears, but natural 'weeping' from the heart.

(What is the cost of real weeping being taboo in modern society?)

*

In the past, tough men - not just monks but Kings and warriors - would cry readily in response to both beauty and loss.

Toughness is not indifference; indifference is not toughness. 

My Northumbrian Charlton ancestors lived in a situation of sustained violence on the border of Scotland and England over some hundreds of years - indeed some regard it as the most sustainedly-very-violent human situation in history.

These were tough men living in a tough world by any historical standard, yet they composed and listened to the Border Ballads; which stand among the best anonymous poetry of the world; they were soft-hearted men, who were affected by life, they wept openly and often.

*

And modern Charltons have retained some of this!

Bobby was probably the greatest footballer England ever produced. A tough sport. That's him on the right of this picture, being awarded the World Cup in 1966:

In tears - and still crying several minutes later - at 2.50 minutes

http://www.spike.com/video-clips/spczv8/world-cup-1966-final-match-highlights

(What an image!)

*

And that is how we must be - both tough and warm-hearted like Bobby Charlton; Bilbo, Frodo and Sam; Harry Potter - all the real heroes.

*

Is life after death important? CG Jung's opinion

Jung in his shirmer phase - beside his mistress/ extra-wife Toni

Regular readers will know that I regard Christianity to be, in essence, Jesus's offer of resurrected eternal Heavenly life to those who follow him. Yet this is very far from being regarded as the core of Christianity. Indeed most Christians would disagree - both now and throughout the history of the Christian churches. 

The idea that we might want/ need/ expect eternal life after mortal death - especially first-and-foremost - is something that the modern mind sees as a bad thing; selfish, childish, indeed ridiculous. To the typical modern atheist-stoic; a desire or demand for life everlasting is seen as irrational; and a product of psychological deficiencies such as wishful thinking and/or cowardice. 

It is interesting to consider what CJ Jung - son of a Protestant Pastor; in late life probably a deist rather than theist, and not a Christian - had to say about life after death, writing in the middle 20th century and in old age. 

It is not that I wish we had a life after death. In fact, I would prefer not to foster such ideas. 

Still, I must state, to give reality its due, that, without my wishing and without my doing anything about it, thoughts of this nature move about within me. 

I can't say whether these thoughts are true or false, but I do know they are there, and can be given utterance, if I do not repress them out of some prejudice. Prejudice cripples and injures the full phenomenon of psychic life. And I know too little about psychic life to feel that I can set it right out of superior knowledge...

I lend an attentive ear to the strange myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at the varied events that come my way, regardless of whether or not they fit in with my theoretical postulates. Unfortunately, the mythic side of man is given short shrift nowadays. He can no longer create fables. As a result, a great deal escapes him; for it is important and salutary to speak also of incomprehensible things. 

Such talk is like the telling of a good ghost story, as we sit by the fireside and smoke a pipe. What the myths or stories about a life after death really mean, or what kind of reality lies behind them, we certainly do not know. 

We cannot tell whether they possess any validity beyond their indubitable value as anthropomorphic projections. Rather, we must hold clearly in mind that there is no possible way for us to attain certainty concerning things which pass our understanding.

From Memories, Dreams, and Reflections by CG Jung 

Jung seems confident that ideas concerning life after death are in the realm of anthropomorphic stories we tell-ourselves, and therefore cannot in principle be understood in terms of truth to reality. 

Nonetheless Jung feels that there is a psychological reality to life after death - and he personally cannot-help but regard an afterlife as something that will happen to him. 

Such a perspective seems only to have been a genuine possibility as a relatively brief transitional phase; possible only for those who were raised religious, became atheist in adolescence or young adulthood, then came to value psychological (or social) aspects of religion as helpful (or indeed necessary) for an integrated and fulfilling life. 

In considering what is objectively real and knowable; Jung's perspective makes the same assumptions and exclusions as natural science - therefore its conclusions are inevitable: and Christianity becomes nothing more than a potentially therapeutic fairy-tale - something that it may make us feel better, if we believe it. 

In a word: for Jung, as for many other modern people, religion is, at best, a palliative. 

He would have said that (for many people) it is "good to believe" - and by "good" he meant good for our health and happiness, here-and-now. 

This (I think) is what underlies the common assertion (something we heard a lot from Prince/ King Charles - for instance) that "faith" is a good thing; while atheism is (usually a mistake, because is makes many people ill, miserable, dysfunctional. 

Jung may argue that life after death is important; but its importance is confined to how we are feeling in life before death. 

Life after death exists as an idea, and its reality relates to the role that ideas have in human functioning. 

(For Jung, this included a collective unconscious that was part of - and accessible to - all humans, and extended through many generations. Yet the nature and value of ideas in the collective unconscious ultimately and inevitably cashed-out in term of human mortal lives; human happiness or misery, health, social functionality and the like.) 

Life after death therefore is excluded from any cosmic role; it cannot have anything to do about solving the fundamental problems of existence - the problem of evil, and the problems of entropy (disease, degeneration, death). 

Life after death by Jung's account can affect what we think about such matters; it is a matter of adjustment to immoveable realities - it is a therapeutic understanding of religion.

As I said, Jung did not, apparently, seriously identify himself as a Christian; but here are plenty of people who do self-identify as Christian and who have a closely similar understanding of life after death. 

Repenting our compelled obedience to Caesar (with reference to the church closures)

In this Global Totalitarian society; Caesar is becoming more powerful - and less escapable - by the day. 

Given that most people are not heroes (and never will be), it is reasonable to assume first that Caesar can, and will, compel our obedience to his dictates; and second that many of these dictates will be evil in both motivation and effect. 

What then should a (serious) Christian do, in this world where he stands alone against a vast monopoly of coercion - when, almost certainly, his church has sumitted enthusiastically to Caesar's yoke, and now lumbers towards hell? 

The answer is that we must repent; but in repenting we must be clear about the spiritual nature of repentance. We must distinguish between our actions - which can be, and are, compelled; and our spiritual discernment - which always chooses.

We may be, we actually are, compelled to obey evil laws; but we can choose to know their evil, can choose to repent our obedience to them - even as we know this state of sinning will continue. 

 

Most Christians leaders will, if pressed, advocate 'rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar's'; but they are, in truth, advocating rendering unto Caesar that which is God's - with the excuse that they have No Alternative but to comply. 

What this actually means is that the (threatened) cost of non-compliance is too high for them to bear, or else they think the cost of disobedience is too high, and not worth paying. 

In sum - they are not heroes of faith. But then again - who is? But few ever, and fewer than ever now. The question is how to live in accordance with God's creation when one is Not a hero of faith.

What Christian leaders should (but do not) acknowledge, is that they have-been and are-being compelled to sin; and that sin requires repentance (and, I would add, the public sin of public figures requires public repentance). 

What they typically fail to acknowledge is that Caesar is - nowadays - on the side of Satan. That is  something they (and we) should be clear about from the start. However it may have been in Roman times; here and now, Caesar is in the business of propaganda for, and enforcement of, inverted values. Caesar serves Satan, not God.

 

Take the example of church closures during the birdemic. Any serious Christian should know by now (and indeed long since) that the birdemic is a Big Lie; and that this Big Lie is being used as a fake rationale for blocking, closing, and (ultimately) destroying all Chrstian churches. 

At this stage, anyone who cannot perceive this has de facto made a choice to join-with the Lie, and affiliate with the side of Satan and his agents. 

But let us say that a Christian leader is also a serious Christian. Unless he is a rare hero, he cannot (and most importantly he will not) resist the evil government regulations enforced upon him. This means that he has been compelled to sin. 

Very well, but this is not of itself a problem for the Christian: Jesus explicitly came to save sinners - those who sin. But this entails that the Pastor or Priest must acknowledge that by obeying Caesar - e.g by closing his church, ceasing to offer the sacraments, and ceasing his personal ministry - he is In Fact sinning. 

 

Sin must be repented - that is uncontroversial. Yet at the same time, Caesar will (in practice) nearly always be obeyed - because very few are heroes of faith. 

So this Christian pastor/ priest is in the position - common enough, indeed universal - and indeed a frequent complaint of the Apostle Paul - that he recognises sin, wants Not to sin, but continues to sin. Indeed, by collaborating with Caesar, he is actively enforcing sin.

That is, the priest/ pastor knows his church should be allowed to remain fully open and fully operative, and should prioritise the spirit above (actually fake) health issues; but in practice he obeys Caesar's rules - and closes the church and ceases to fulfil his pastoral duties. 

He knows sin, repents sin, continues to sin...

Yet surely this is just the human condition? And this is exactly what Jesus takes-account of. Jesus recognises that perfection is impossible, that we will sin, that we will continue to sin; but if we recognise our sin and continue to love and follow* Jesus - then salvation will be ours. 

In this world of 2020, we need to be much clearer about the fact that we will all, in many ways, be compelled to obey Caesar, and by this obedience we will be compelled to sin. We should not even pretend that we 'will do better in future' and will strive to 'cease sinning' because this is not true. 

We will not do better, nor will we strive to do better; instead we will carry on sinning just as we do now. However, we acknowledge and repent this.

 

What then? Well first we must repent. And a public sin - such as closing a church - ought publicly to be repented; the sin needs to be named, acknowledged, specified - else the flock are being taught a false doctrine; are being taught that sin is good. 

And this needs to be done with full recognition that the recognised sin will continue to be done. There should be no false consolation that 'in future' we are going to become heroes of faith. We aren't.

 

For instance. The priest or pastor stands up to address the congregation and informs them that he is closing the church next week; ceasing to offer Holy Communion, baptism and funeral rites; and he will not visit is flock**. 

Or, he says that - for the church to remain open; congregants must stand far apart and avoid each other, cover their faces, and refrain from human contact of all kinds. 

(We will all treat each other as the Pharisees treated lepers, and ourselves behave as lepers were required to: in future we will regard each other primarily as disease vectors; only secondarily as human persons with human needs.) 

Then the priest/ pastor must state clearly that these are evil changes, which he knows as evil and rejects; that he repents his continuing and future compliance with these evil policies - and he asks God's forgiveness for these sins. 

(He may go on to clarify that these measures are intended to drive men apart and to destroy the churches. He may advise his flock how best to cope alone, and essentially abandoned by the churches.)

But in the end the priest or pastor must be clear that he personally is sinning by his compliance with regulations, yet that he intends to continue compliance; and must repent this sinning. 

This kind of repentance ought to be almost a routine matter for all serious Christians, because this kind of sinning is routine. (Maybe that 'routine' is the trouble?) But modern secular leftist pseudo-ethics has ensured that any explicit failure to live by one's explicit belief will almost certainly be termed 'hypocrisy' (when it is, in reality, almost the opposite). 

Such behaviour may also be called cowardice, and in a sense that is a just accusation; but confessed and repented cowardice is alright. Probably nearly everybody is 'a coward', to a significant degree; especially when alone and confronted by the overwhelming powers of the Global Caesar of 2020. 

(Like all sins, cowardice is only lethal to salvation when denied. A confessed coward, one who fully acknowledges that cowardice is indeed a sin, is acceptable to God.) 

 

A priest or pastor who closes his church in obedience to Caesar's latest diktat, and for fear of the consequences of disobedience, needs to make all of this clear; needs (in some public way - whether at the pulpit, in the parish magazine, or face to face with individuals) to make clear that he is sinning; that he repents his sin, but nonetheless will continue to obey Caesar.

And we are all in exactly the same situation - to a greater or lesser extent. We all do obey unjust and evil-motivated regulations; therefore we all need to repent our continued wrong-doing, and acknowledge that we will continue to do wrong. 

(Just because an evil is universal and a matter of routine, does not prevent it being a sin. We all choose to comply with a routine - we have all chosen to sin.)

 

When we are compelled to live by lies, we must confess these lies. We must Not propagandise for these lies, must not excuse the lies, must not pretend that the lies are motivated by love of God. 

Why is it so difficult to say this? So difficult to say that we have bent the knee to Caesar, and we will in fact continue to do so; but that we know we do wrong, and we do repent and affirm our affiliation to God, and to the Good? 

Only thus can we render to God what is God's.   

*Note: 'Following' Jesus does not mean being like him - because that would be impossible, it would entail never sinning; and we do sin and cannot stop sinning. Following Jesus means something much more literal - as described in the Good Shepherd parable, and reinforced throughout the Fourth Gospel. Following Jesus is to love and trust the Good Shepherd to lead us through the portal of death to the joy of resurrected life eternal. We must follow where he leads. 

**Note added later: In general, the repentance should occur wherever and whenever the information about closures etc. is provided: whether 'live' in a service, or whether on church noticeboards, web pages, social media etc. An announcement of compliance with Caesar's evil rules is therefore accompanied by a statement that these are evil, and a statement of repentance for complying. The specific reasons for complying are not really significant, in a public forum at any rate.  

 

The extreme depravity of modern Western leaders

*

I was suddenly struck by an awareness of the unprecedented extremity of evil among Western leaders - at all levels, but the higher the level the greater average depravity; the fewer exceptions.

*

When King Henry II of England had Thomas Becket (Archbishop of Canterbury) killed for reasons of expediency; he was stricken by overwhelming remorse, and performed extravagant penances which served as a public demonstration of his error. It is inconceivable that anything of that sort could happen among today's leadership.

*

We are ruled by the Men Without Chests of Lewis or the Hollow Men of Eliot - or the Voldemort types who have deliberately fragmented their souls, or Mouths of Sauron who simply channel evil.

They plot and scheme to subvert, invert and destroy all virtue; they prosecute truth as oppression; and propagandize deliberate, sickening ugliness as the highest aesthetic.

*

Yet they are utterly without awareness of their own depravity; regard themselves as the cutting edge of goodness.

*

They have constructed a world in which their own planned and systematic promotion of evil counts for nothing against them; and where their restraint from following-through their evil ethic to its extreme conclusions in absolute selfish short-termism seems to them to imply an almost super-human innate virtue+.

*

They have all this reflected-back at them in the media world that is their headquarters and which dominates and permeates their lives; a world in which traditional evaluations of truth, beauty and virtue have been abolished except to be inverted: the venom in excluding from this world, suppressing, misrepresenting, punishing the expression of Goodness is by now something extraordinary.

*

This is, indeed, the most depraved ruling elite that there ever has been in the history of the world - precisely because it seems so impossible that they could ever come to awareness of their own depravity.

*

For such people to repent would, of course, be a truly cataclysmic event in their lives; to perceive the sheer mass of their own efforts on behalf of depravity would be of soul-crushing force; it would be so agonizing that only Christian forgiveness could rescue them from utter despair - yet that was the very first possibility they eliminated, several generations since.

*

The absence of nobility from public life; the shallowness of the people; the cowardice both individually and collectively - all these are aspects of this situation: the extreme depravity of our leadership, so extreme that their evil is almost unrecognizable.

These are such pathetic remnants of humans that we barely recognize the possibility of responsible choice - yet we know it is there.

In the vastly inflated balloons of conceit and artifice which are modern leaders; in some corner, hidden away, there is a pathetic whimpering child still capable of agency; and still choosing - day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment - to sustain the monstrous falsity of their empty lives.

*

+ There are many examples in the realm of sexual ethics - when multiple serial monogamy is regarded as virtue compared with multiple simultaneous promiscuity; or among the multiply simultaneously promiscuous when being open and 'honest' about infidelity is regarded as virtue compared with concealment; or when multiply simultaneously concealed promiscuity is disciplined by some restraint as regards classes of acceptable partners (age limits, no orgies etc)... Every depraved individual draws a circle around, makes an ethical imperative of, their own limits to depravity - then feels spontaneously self-disciplined, relatively virtuous, superior to (some) others. Mutatis mutandis wrt dishonesty etc. - for instance, there is little to compare with the incredulous moral indignation of the systematically dishonest administrator, manager or journalist whose entire professional life is spent misleading by selection and distortion of the truth - when they are accused of actual lying! 

*

The "hero fighting his own destiny" trope: expected, normal, approved...

One of the ways in which 'modern' stories (of the past few decades) differ from literature up to the middle twentieth century - is that now the 'hero' (protagonist) of a story will nearly always fight against his own 'destiny'. And, indeed, that fight takes-up a good deal of the narrative. 

Thus if the 'chosen-one' of a mythic narrative swiftly and decisively takes-up his heroic role and does his best with what ought-to-be done (like Frodo) - this is regarded as unsatisfactory. But if the appointed-hero struggles (at length) against adopting his role, if he is tempted strongly to abandon it, if he acts in violation of his role and needs to be brought-back... this stuff gets a writer critical 'Brownie points'. 

Struggle-against-destiny has become the usual thing for a modern hero. 

My impression is that this inward fight against what he (or she) ought to do, is expected and approved-of by those who consume and comment on novels, TV, movies etc. For instance; introduction of this self-doubting, inner-conflicted element to several major characters, over and again (Aragorn, Theoden, Faramir...), was perhaps the major distortion of the Lord of the Rings movies, compared with the original fiction. 

If such inner conflict is not present, the writer is likely to be accused of childish simplicity, of having 'black and white' characters; whereas a hero divided-against his destiny is regarded as complex, subtle, realistic, mature.

But the anti-heroic-hero is not a wise Man, nor is he a Man who is consciously adopting what he regards to be the highest path. The focus of stories is moved away from what needs to be done - and trying to do it; towards inner psychological - even psycho-pathological - rumination and conflict. 

Drama has become psychodrama - myth has become a psychoanalytic explaining-away of myth. 

What this means, when repeated again and again stereotypically and in context in which the 'hero' is implicitly admirable, whatever he does (so long as he is in at least two-minds about it) - and when the 'embrace my destiny' hero is excluded; is that the question of a Man's proper aim of life has been deleted; the possibility of wisdom has been deleted - because wisdom is to know what one ought to do, and to do it as best possible. 

Furthermore, the anti-hero makes all stories mundane - all are diminished to the level of endless soap operas (who are eventually driven to deploy this 'inner division' to permutate character motivations and actions over the long term). There can be no real 'myth' or 'magic' - because mythical and magical characters are excluded. 

A real, wise hero is not one who wallows interminably in uncertainty; nor one who is only compelled to - finally! - do the right thing by elaborate coincidences of external circumstances, or the harsh (yet, somehow always reversible!) lessons of selfishness, short-termism, hedonism and cowardice. Wisdom is - by contrast - knowing quickly what is needed, and then doing it as best possible, despite problems. 

In real life - as we used to know - it is not the mixed-up, self-indulgent, inwardly conflicted Man who does the right thing and saves 'the world' - and fiction cannot convince us that he is. 

Instead, we take-home, absorb and learn a message that there is no real heroism because there is no real destiny: because there is nothing to be heroic-about!

We learn that action comes from mixtures of self-centred motivations and external compulsions; and the sophisticated, admirable Man is one who talks extensively about his feelings and paradoxes - such as the incompatibility of the things he wants (home and adventure, flee or fight, wife or mistress... whatever).

Since the best fiction is also a kind of vicarious experience; the conflicted anti-heroic protagonist is likely to be worse than useless (i.e. harmful) as a model for how we personally ought to approach this mortal life.  

But unfortunately, writers have become addicted to this kind of protagonist; because the delay in adopting destiny, and 'getting on with what he ought to be doing' can be spun-out narratively for astonishing periods: many volumes of a book series, many episodes of a TV programme, most of a long movie...  

When a writer is praised for such shameless and easy padding-out of stories; little wonder that so many succumb to the temptation - and thereby contribute their mite to the corruption of Men and culture. 

Everything nowadays hinges on what counts as 'evidence'

To my mind, our whole modern situation keeps returning to the same question, and it confronts each person individually on multiple occasions. That question could be phrased as 'what is your evidence?'

We seem to require 'evidence' for our beliefs, but we expect that evidence be 'objective' - that evidence is Not derived from what we personally know or can do; but comes to us from outside.

Any evidence that comes from our own efforts is supposed to bepotentially delusional - because tainted by our own subjectivity ('wishful thinking'); but somehow external evidence - provided by 'other people' - is somehow immune from their subjectivity...

Somehow, we don't notice that the problem of subjectivity has not been eliminated by outsourcing judgment; and neither have constraints as the need for honesty and ability.

'Evidence' just-is made by people, and if the people who supply 'evidence' are incompetent or dishonest, then we would be (we are) stupid to take any notice.


Who can we trust to provide us with external evidence that is strong enough to over-ride our own, personally-derived knowledge?

Simply asking the question reveals that we are - all the time - implicitly trusting people whom we would not explicitly trust; we believe people that we do not know, and do not know anything about - yet we trust and believe them more than our own intuition, common sense and personal experience...

It looks as if our world has convinced us only to believe what others tell us, and not even to allow us to choose who the 'others' might be.

Our world tells us that we must Not think for our-selves (because that is merely subjective, delusional, wishful thinking) but Must believe Other People (whose thinking is, somehow, Not subjective, delusional wishful thinking when they are telling us what to believe!); and it defines what kinds of people we must believe.

Our only allowed choice is among the approved people and groups.


The way out of this hall-of-mirrors is fully, and consciously, to acknowledge that all evidence ultimately depends upon our-selves - on who we chose to trust.

We can either make this decision for ourselves - or allow the decision to be made for us, by... well, by whoever happens to be dominant in our environment.

And that is what keeps people compliant, and what stops people thinking for (and from) them-selves - fear of whoever happens to be dominant.

To think for oneself entails disbelieving and defying whoever-is-dominant. And that is always a risk; one way or another.


One might suppose that 'thinking is free' - that what is 'inside our heads' is private and safe - yet that is not how our minds work. In practice we all believe (we 'know') that our thinking is not private, that other-people (including whoever-is-dominant) know what we are thinking...

Even though modern materialism denies that this 'mind-reading' is really possible; something in us knows that thoughts make a difference; and we are therefore afraid to have defiant and disobedient thoughts.

We fear that our disbelieving and defying thoughts may be used as evidence against us... And we are right!

Thus we (guiltily) try to control our own thinking - as well as behaviour. 


And thus we are captured by the system - afraid even to acknowledge our situation, and the absurdity - the incoherence - of what goes on every-day as 'normal'!

But the way-out is - and we know this too! - perfectly simple. Simple but risky.

Therefore it is cowardice that is the problem, not ignorance, nor weakness.


Because thought is Not private, thought Is effectual...

Therefore Thinking Makes A Difference.

And - given that we could think for-ourselves, if we chose - that is the most defiant and disobedient 'thought' of all...

Understand that what we are seeing is 'things coming to a point': and that this is our best hope

I know I have said this many times over the years I have been blogging, but not all current reader have been around that long; and it is terribly important to understand!

(To see what I have previously written - word-search 'coming to a point'.)

In the public domain, the mass media, the politics-government, in education and all other major social systems we are seeing 'things coming to a point' - this process is very far advanced, continues, is apparently accelerating.

The phrase comes from That Hideous Strength by CS Lewis, which is available free online at Project Gutenberg in Canada; it means much the same as what people imply by the misuse of the word 'polarisation' - it means that Good and evil are becoming so extreme as to lose the grey areas and be starkly separated; it means that there is no neutrality and every-thing of any possible public significance is now-and-increasingly either positively/ actively/ purposively-Good or positively/ actively/ purposively-evil.

This creates all kinds of problems, suffering, hardship, But in a world such as this one, coming to a point is a Good-thing. By 'Good' I mean in a spiritual and eternal sense - not a materialist and this-worldly sense. The process is Good for our souls, even when it is bad for our minds and bodies.

It is Good because it is better than the alternative; which is more of the same as we have been getting for the past fifty years; and which has led-to, is leading to ever-more, materialism, hedonism, short-termism, hopelessness, cowardice, despair... and consequently the active-embrace-and-propagation of lies, ugliness, sin and all other forms of evil.

The news, the law, the workplace, the schools and colleges, the mainstream churches - are pushing the evil agenda more and more aggressively, extremely, and rapidly. Whether this is because they can't help themselves, or because they feel that all opposition has now been crushed - or whether they fear that people might wake-up and push back (or from some blend of these) doesn't really matter: It Is Happening.  

Because things are coming to a point, it gets easier to notice and understand what is happening; and this a Good because it is something that each individual can only do For Himself. If he does not do it For Himself, then it merely passive, therefore it has Not Actually Happened.

Of course, so far, things have been coming to a point, Good and evil are ever-more-clearly distinct - and people have been choosing evil en masse. So be it. People have agency, people can choose evil, and they are apparently doing so in very large numbers. If so, they have made their choice and Will live with that choice (unless or until they repent it, which usually gets harder with time).

This is a test for everyone: it is a test for Christians. Christians are confronted with worldly-expediency versus spiritual virtue again and again, every day and in multiple situations; and their response (I mean their response in their own thinking) will necessarily go one way, or the other way.

Our true motivation is recurrently being tested, hence refined and strengthened.

This is Good and we ought to be grateful; because this is exactly theosis; it is how we grow in divinity (or the opposite).

**

Excerpt from Chapter 4 of That Hideous Strength, giving the origin of the concept of 'Things coming to a point':

"Have you ever noticed," said Dimble, "that the universe, and every little bit of the universe, is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point?"

His wife waited as those wait who know by long experience the mental processes of the person who is talking to them.

"I mean this," said Dimble, in answer to the question she had not asked. "If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family--anything you like--at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow-room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder. Like in the poem about Heaven and Hell eating into merry Middle Earth from opposite sides . . . how does it go? Something about 'eat every day . . . till all is somethinged away.' It can't be eaten, that wouldn't scan. My memory has failed dreadfully these last few years. Do you know the bit, Margery?"

"What you were saying reminded me more of the bit in the Bible about the winnowing fan. Separating the wheat and the chaff. Or like Browning's line: 'Life's business being just the terrible choice.'"

"Exactly! Perhaps the whole time-process means just that and nothing else. But it's not only in questions of moral choice. Everything is getting more itself and more different from everything else all the time. Evolution means species getting less and less like one another. Minds get more and more spiritual, matter more and more material. Even in literature, poetry and prose draw further and further apart."

Mrs. Dimble with the ease born of long practice averted the danger, ever present in her house, of a merely literary turn being given to the conversation.

"Yes," she said. "Spirit and matter, certainly. That explains why people like the Studdocks find it so difficult to be happily married."

"The Studdocks?" said Dimble, looking at her rather vaguely. The domestic problems of that young couple had occupied his mind a good deal less than they had occupied his wife's. "Oh, I see! Yes. I dare say that has something to do with it. But about Merlin: what it comes to, as far as I can make out, is this. There were still possibilities for a man of that age which there aren't for a man of ours. The earth itself was more like an animal in those days. And mental processes were much more like physical actions. And there were--well, Neutrals, knocking about."

"Neutrals?"

"I don't mean, of course, that anything can be a real neutral. A conscious being is either obeying God or disobeying Him. But there might be things neutral in relation to us."

"You mean eldils--angels?"

"Well, the word angel rather begs the question. Even the Oyéresu aren't exactly angels in the same sense as our guardian angels are. Technically, they are Intelligences. The point is that while it may be true at the end of the world to describe every eldil either as an angel or a devil, and may even be true now, it was much less true in Merlin's time. There used to be things on this earth pursuing their own business, so to speak. They weren't ministering spirits sent to help fallen humanity, but neither were they enemies preying upon us. Even in St. Paul one gets glimpses of a population that won't exactly fit into our two columns of angels and devils. And if you go back further . . . all the gods, elves, dwarfs, water-people, fate, longaevi. You and I know too much to think they are just illusions."

"You think there are things like that?"

"I think there were. I think there was room for them then, but the universe has come more to a point. Not all rational things perhaps. Some would be mere wills inherent in matter, hardly conscious. More like animals. Others--but I don't really know. At any rate, that is the sort of situation in which one got a man like Merlin."

"It all sounds rather horrible to me."

"It was rather horrible. I mean even in Merlin's time (he came at the extreme tail end of it), though you could still use that sort of life in the universe innocently, you couldn't do it safely. The things weren't bad in themselves, but they were already bad for us. They sort of withered the man who dealt with them. Not on purpose. They couldn't help doing it. Merlinus is withered. He's quite pious and humble and all that, but something has been taken out of him. That quietness of his is just a little deadly, like the quiet of a gutted building. It's the result of having laid his mind open to something that broadens the environment just a bit too much. Like polygamy. It wasn't wrong for Abraham, but one can't help feeling that even he lost something by it."

"Cecil," said Mrs. Dimble, "do you feel quite comfortable about the Director's using a man like this? I mean, doesn't it look a little bit like fighting Belbury with its own weapons?"

"No. I had thought of that. Merlin is the reverse of Belbury. He's at the opposite extreme. He is the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused. For him every operation on Nature is a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking one's horse. After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something dead--a machine to be worked, and taken to bits if it won't work the way he pleases. Finally come the Belbury people, who take over that view from the modern man unaltered and simply want to increase their power by tacking on to it the aid of spirits--extra-natural, anti-natural spirits. Of course they hoped to have it both ways. They thought the old magia of Merlin, which worked in with the spiritual qualities of Nature, loving and reverencing them and knowing them from within, could be combined with the new goeteia--the brutal surgery from without. No. In a sense, Merlin represents what we've got to get back to in some different way. Do you know that he is forbidden by the rules of his order ever to use any edged tool on any growing thing?"

What can we learn from the Brexit blockers?

The vote to leave the European Union was more than three years ago, yet we still have not left and are no closer to leaving. This is because the implementation has been resisted every inch of the way by the UK Establishment - by whatever means seemed to be effective.

Over the past fifty or so years, the people's of the developed nations have been encaged by a Leftist totalitarian bureaucracy that now extends through all powerful or wealthy corporations, organisations, institutions and workplaces. We now find ourselves in an insane virtual world of omni-surveillance and micro-control that has inverted natural virtue.

Yet this was hardly resisted at all - I know because I was one of very few who did try to resist it in medicine, science and the universities. Every latest new tyranny was accepted with either a shrug and a moan, or eagerly as presenting career opportunities.

Yet, if each of the incremental stages towards totalitarian tyranny had been resisted; again and again, at every level, by the mass of those whom it would afflict - none of it could have happened.

Why was it not resisted? Why is no top-down evil ever seriously resisted (except as a ruse to introduce something worse)? Because the mass of people lack sufficient motivation.

Why do they lack motivation to defend even themselves - their power, autonomy, wealth, health, comfort, peace, prospects? Because they lack religion.

Men need religion - I mean a real religion. All Men in the past had a religion; most non-Westerners still do. Subtract religion - subtract the spirit world, the soul, the afterlife, spontaneous morality etc - and one is left with the psychotic, foolish puppets that are the mass of modern, Western Men.

Men cannot function without religion. Without religion, Men do not even choose to reproduce at the minimum replacement level - without religion Men choose extinction.

So what of the motivation of the Brexit saboteurs? They are - mostly - exactly the same kind of mass people that have been - over two generations - too feeble and frightened to raise a finger to resist their own incremental enslavement.

The Brexit blockers are doing exactly the same as everybody else. They are behaving psychotically - according to delusions and in response to here and now inducements (sticks and carrots, threats and bribes). 

Above them are Them: the 'hidden hand' of the Global Establishment - which is a department of the demons, with the agenda of evil - and who find the totalitarian EU a useful tool in their plan of subversion, inversion and control.

I am not saying anything so foolish as that we should 'learn from' the Brexit-traitors, blockers and saboteurs who (ultimately) serve Satan... I am saying that nothing will be done about Brexit, nothing will happen towards a better world, unless or until the British (specifically the English) again become religious.


At present the British are literally hope-less - since the mass majority are hedonistic cowards. They can't even act to defend themselves and the lives in the most basic and obvious ways - naturally they will fail to compel the Establishment to leave the EU.

Courage comes from belief; and a society of materialistic unbelievers is a weak, foolish, distraction-seeking, despicable society; and will be treated accordingly.

The situation is now, here, today... pretty-much as stark as situations get. Each person is faced by a choice, and compelled to make that choice - any attempted evasion of responsibility is to choose totalitarian evil.

I would love to be surprised; but after decades of ingrained cowardice due to unthinking, hedonistic atheism, I am Not optimistic.

Why is a change of consciousness necessary for modern Christians?

Because too many people are operating from false selves - that are merely automatic processes built by our interactions. Only the true self is free.

The true self is free, and nothing else is free. It is unique, thus all free thought is unique - it is also a child of divinity so the true self is godlike and in relationship with deity and all other true selves among our siblings (men and women, also angels and demons).

If we are not thinking from our true selves, we are just responding robots - we are automatic and we are existentially isolated.

There is a chosen state of unfreedom that is the entombing of the true self within automatic responses, stimulations. Such a person is a true slave - such a person has enslaved himself to the environment. (True slavery is a mental choice - a physical slave may have complete freedom in thinking from his true self.)

Another state is to choose freedom but deny relation - to cut-off the divine relation with deity. This is a complete freedom without meaning - it is total isolation.

To accept unfreedom is either mental slavery or isolation.

(We are born free, but from our freedom choose unfreedom - this is usual, it happens sometime in childhood, adolescence, or as young adults. There is temptation, and mostly people choose to succumb. And they know it. They could escape - but pretend they cannot, that there is no escape -- or that there is nowhere to escape to...)

It is our task to live in freedom and in relation, live in thinking located in the true self. The enemies are confusion, hedonism, cowardice, dishonesty... pride. Freedom is a state of simplicity and clarity - unique and potentially universal. And there are no shortcuts to it, no standard methods, no single or safe path.

We must reach our unique freedom from our unique circumstances - this is a quest, an adventure, it is happening now.

Only from a condition of freedom can we be Christian.